That’s Wall Street in 1896. And that’s Times Square 15 years later. One of the things about multipolar eras and competition is that they breed innovation. You should be optimistic. You should be aggressive. That now is the time to go after things.

This is a picture of Wall Street in 1896. Sit with the picture for a moment. Imagine what it’s like to be there. There’s no cars yet. Horses and buggies. Let’s imagine it’s summer in New York City, so maybe we can imagine how that smells. There’s no electric light. So, imagine, you know, maybe and there’s no gas lanterns here, either. So, a pretty dark street in general. If you really want to let your imagination run wild, like maybe there’s a whiff of starch in the air from the conservative clothing. As we talked about, there’s no phonographs yet. So, maybe there’s a live singer hiding somewhere in this photo. I don’t know.

That’s Wall Street in 1896. And that’s Times Square 15 years later. One of the things about multipolar eras and competition is that they breed innovation and they breed competition.

I think one of the things when people listen to me talk, they say, “Oh god, you must think the world is ending. You must not sleep well at night.” I sleep great. I’m somebody who allocates capital. I advise people on on allocating capital. I advise corporates on where to spend money and things like that. Now is the good time.

I’ve been often quoting the parable from from Genesis lately, where Joseph is interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams and he says there’s going to be seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. Now are the seven years of plenty. I worry a little bit about the world that my daughters are going to inherit. But the world for the next five years, the next 10 years, the folks that are going to be successful are the ones who get out of the fetal position, who stop assuming the old world of globalization is coming back, and instead see the world as it is, and see the immense opportunity behind every single disruption that I talked about here on stage today.

I asked my AI assistant Sally to generate an image for me of what it would look like in 15 years if a ship was passing through the Strait of Hormuz. This is what she gave me. I’m not quite sure I buy it. There’s a lot going on in this picture in general. But what I would submit to you is that the future 15 or 10 or 5 years from now probably looks closer to what Sally’s putting on this photo than what it looks like today. It’s going to be probably step-wise change from like Wall Street to Times Square in general.

So if you take one thing from my presentation, let it be this, that you should be optimistic, that you should be aggressive, that now is the time to go after things because it is not going to get better necessarily from here. I think now is actually pretty good.